Which makes sense, because curly fries are the best fries. Ranked number one, even ahead of beer-battered and seasoned. That’s followed by waffle then shoestring. Let’s bust out a quick, internet-style ranking. Here we go.
1. Curly
2. Beer-battered
3. Seasoned
4. Waffle
5. Shoestring
6. Regular
7. Steak
Steak fries fucking suck. If you ever meet someone who likes steak fries, you know you’ve run into a grade-A idiot. A birther in opinions about potato form.
But we have gotten way ahead of ourselves. Because this isn’t about the best fry. We already know that. It’s about a study that says smart people like curly fries. Sort of. It’s more about a study about how people associate with people like themselves. From Slate:
One study in this space, published in 2013 by researchers at the University of Cambridge and their colleagues, gathered data from 60,000 Facebook users and, with their Facebook “likes” alone, predicted a wide range of personal traits. The researchers could predict attributes like a person’s gender, religion, sexual orientation, and substance use (drugs, alcohol, smoking).
These predictions didn’t come from obvious likes. For example, if someone likes the Republican Party’s Facebook page, it probably indicates that person is a Republican. But the connections used in this research are not obvious. The top likes that were strongly indicative of high intelligence, for instance, were “Thunderstorms,” “The Colbert Report,” “Science,” and “Curly Fries.”
How could liking curly fries be predictive? The reasoning relies on a few insights from sociology. Imagine one of the first people to like the page happened to be smart. Once she liked it, her friends saw it. A social science concept called homophily tells us that people tend to be friends with people like themselves. Smart people tend to be friends with smart people. Liberals are friends with other liberals. Rich people hang out with other rich people.
So if a smart person likes curly fries, her (smart) friends see that and some of them like the page, too.
Sure, yea, maybe. But it’s also because curly fries are the shit. And smart people know what is and isn’t the shit.
The end.